Pro tip: Defragmenting only works on spinning drives because it puts the data nearer to the spindle so seek times are shorter. Solid-state drives wear out faster if you defragment them, since every write involves a little bit of damage.
well, defragging my ssd was the only thing that let me shrink the windows partition safely when i dualbooted... tho maybe thats just windows being funky
That kinda makes sense. Putting all the partition sectors together would probably make it easier to resize. But as standard maintenance it's like changing the oil on an electric car.
You just don't want to do it regularly. It was an issue for a brief time when SSDs were new, but modern operating systems are smart enough to exclude SSDs from scheduled defrags.
Random reads are still slower than sequential in SSD. try torrenting for a year on SSD, then benchmark then defragment then benchmark. it will be very measureable difference. you may need some linux filesystem like XFS as im not sure if there is a way to defrag SSDs in windows.
That's because the drive was written to its limits; the defrag runs a TRIM command that safely releases and resets empty sectors. Random reads and sequential reads /on clean drives that are regularly TRIMmed/ are within random variance of each other.
Source: ran large scale data collection for a data centre when SSDs were relatively new to the company so focused a lot on it, plus lots of data from various sectors since.
According to the man(8) page, it will avoid touching any blocks that have the chattr -f flag set, which is XSR_XFLAGS_NODEFRAG... So I think if the docs are still accurate to the code, yes.
Pro tip: That tip has been obsolete for a long time now.
Running the defragmentation tool on an SSD in Windows optimizes the drive (pretty much just running TRIM). It's not possible to defragment an SSD in Windows (maybe there is a way using some register hack but that's out of scope)
Defragging is about.... defragging: making the data contiguous (a continuous stream along one arc of the same radius) so it doesn't have to jump around.
